Tag Archives: prison

I’ve always considered Spandau Prison a bit like something in “news of the weird.”

On July 18, 1947, the seven top German war criminals to survive World War 2 moved into their new prison in the Spandau district in Berlin. Rudolf Heß, odd bird and formerly Hitler’s favorite, had a lifetime sentence. So did the economic minister Walther Funk and the head of the navy, Erich Raeder. The wily Albert Speer got twenty years, not for being Hitler’s architect, but for feeding the Third Reich’s armaments factories with slave labor from occupied lands. Baldur von Schirach got 20 years for his role in the Hitler Youth. Konstantin von Neurath got 15, and Karl Dönitz, Reichspresident after Hitler’s death, got 10.

The Allies weren’t taking any chances. The criminals were locked into individual cells in the former fortress prison with guards from all four victorious powers, who rotated the duty every month.

If there was any sign of how dangerous the Allies considered these men, this was it. An entire prison for 7 people in isolation as if they were a cancer – which they were. Still, it’s amazing how much time, effort, resources and money the Allies poured into that prison for so few men for thirty years.

I’m not sure if the special treatment helped these men maintain a certain status that it would’ve been best to wipe out right away via keeping them in a normal prison. In isolation, but a run-of-the-mill one, same as any other max security prisoner would get. It would’ve been nice to see these war criminals cut down to size.

The prison isn’t there anymore, and here’s why. Rudolf Heß, 93 and the last inmate, killed himself in 1987. With that, the prison had fulfilled its purpose. It was torn down so that neo-Nazis who revered Heß couldn’t use it as a shrine.

In 1946, Germany lay in ruins and everything was scarce – including paper to print books. After over a decade of censorship and lack of literary freedom, German writers who felt muzzled during the Nazi era could finally speak up again.

One of the first important postwar books published in Germany was Luise Rinser’s Prison Journal. In snippets from her secret diary, she showed the life of women in a Nazi prison in 1944 and 1945. I read this little book in one day, swept up in the immediate feel of the diary entries and the conditions Rinser and the other women lived under. Rinser was a “political,” imprisoned for making comments that “undermined the war effort.” A friend had betrayed her (some friend!). Through connections, she slowed her case, and the end of the war was probably the only thing that saved her from being tried and executed for treason.

The book made waves after the war, but Rinser downplayed its importance in light of the bigger atrocities committed in the death camps. Compared to that, her tail of filth, hunger, fear and humiliation seemed almost mild.

Ironically, in a biography written after her death, it was revealed that Rinser had been an early Nazi enthusiast, a detail she never admitted in her lifetime.